Existing comment:
Restoration and Recovery:
Restoration ecology is the emerging science of repairing damaged habitats by approximating their natural processes and functions.
At Mono Lake the key restoration strategy is based on restoring stream flow and raising the level of the lake, but "saving Mono Lake" requires additional tactics. The California State Water Resources Control Board also ordered the damaged resources be restored.
The State Water Board objectives are to "restore, preserve, and protect the streams and fisheries... and to help mitigate for the loss of waterfowl habitat due to diversions..." The actions outlined in Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's restoration plans are designed to reinstate natural processes and habitat conditions. The most important action is providing the streams with variable flows that simulate the streams' natural fluctuations, which include periodic flooding. These floods eventually will raise the level of Mono Lake to an average level of 6,392 feet.
Can Mono Lake be fully restored?
Mono Lake's historic landscapes were living, dynamic ecosystems that will be difficult to re-create. Some of the processes are conditions of the historic landscape have been permanently lost or cannot be naturally restored. For this reason, certain "helping hand" activities such as tree planting, enhancing freshwater ponds and developing a burn program may help mitigate specific habitat losses.
The State Water board's decision is a compromise: although the lake level will rise as much as 17 feet above its recent low point in 1994, it will stabilize at about 25 feet below its pre-diversion level in 1941. A "natural" balance will never be restored since water will continue to be diverted to Los Angeles. Nonetheless, many of the Basin's damaged resources should recover substantially. The streamflows outlined in the plan are expected to re-introduce channel complexity and dynamic functions that will support healthy fisheries and adjacent cottonwood-willow riparian forests. Mono Lake will rise, stabilize and fluctuate during wet and dry climatic cycles as it once did.
Tracking recovery, adapting the plans:
Monitoring plays a key role in Mono Basin restoration. Scientists will annually monitor the progress of stream restoration efforts and the effects of waterfowl habitat improvements around the lake. The information they gather will be used to recommend changes in the restoration program should it not be progressing satisfactorily toward agreed upon restoration objectives. This approach to managing the process -- called adaptive management -- allows flexibility in restoring a complex natural system. Since nature does not always conform to human imposed objectives, restoration is a continually evolving process.
How long will it take?
It will take 20 to 50 years for mature forests to re-grow along the streams, but already there is a dramatic change. Young trees are growing vigorously and wet-loving wild rose is out-competing sagebrush.
Some resources will not be restored. For example, Rush Creek cut down through the Rush Creek delta as the lake level dropped. The stream channel cannot be brought back to its former level on the delta. Instead, the lake will rise and fill the downcut stream channel, creating an embayment -- a "ria" -- at the mouth of the stream. There will be new, different resource values associated with the ria.
Monitoring:
Monitoring is a means of tracking progress and providing information for making changes, if needed, to restoration. |